


The Unbearable Lightness of Meat

by Khazar222



Series: In The Aftermath [2]
Category: Warcraft, World of Warcraft
Genre: Alliance, Alternate Canon, Alternate Universe, Blackrock Depths, Blackrock Mountain, Blackwing Lair, Conditioning, Draenei, Drakonid, Dungeon, Eredar, Goblins, Horde, Modern Art, Orcs, POV First Person, Post-Apocalypse, Worgen, World of Warcraft - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-22
Updated: 2013-03-22
Packaged: 2017-12-06 02:01:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/730327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Khazar222/pseuds/Khazar222
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The War has passed and the Black Mountain stands abandoned. Yet someone still moves within the rubble--and from the outside, something comes to reshape the mountain into the ultimate parody.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Unbearable Lightness of Meat

**Author's Note:**

> Alternate Title: Guide Me O Thou Great Black Mountain
> 
> The war hollowed out the insides of the mountain. When the dust settled, a predator caught the scent. A tale of Pavlovian conditioning, body horror, and Modern Art. An exploration of the terrifying contours of "instanced zones." Informed by: North Korean propaganda videos, Peter Watts' The Things, late-night Blackrock solo runs, and the devastation of the city of Aleppo in the ongoing Syrian Civil War.
> 
> Beta by the inimitable Witticaster Cole.
> 
> Warning for violence, gore, and frightening scenes.
> 
> Recommended Listening: Dead Can Dance - Return of the She-King ; Susumu Yokota - Blood and Snow ; Atrium Carceri - The Circle

 

 

 

 

 

~~1~~

 

Babalon's first major project in the dead mountain was called, "Holy Mountain Chicken Witch."  
  
Each city square had a statue of a former statesman. Most had been destroyed in the invasion, but Babalon found one that had been merely beheaded. She affixed a woman's mummified corpse to the top, so selected, she said, for her long black hair. She tied a sickle in her hand.

The chickens had to be slaughtered; a flock had survived the purge in one of the warrens, breeding sickly fodder for the remaining things that crept through the dead rock. Babalon said we needed hundreds.  
  
The statue was over thirty feet tall, and it took a long time to nail each and every headless chicken to the stone. Babalon would not let either of us rest. She calls this "aesthetic asceticism." I let the Guide in my head store this information, because Babalon knows much.  
  
When we finished the "project," as Babalon calls them, she said, "Lacking. Pedestrian. Pedantic. A good start, though. What's next?"  
  
I can read very few of the words written in the old books of the city, those that survived the fires and the looting. But some of them are simple tales told through pictures. These are "picture books," the Guide told me, for children.  
  
This is the picture-book story of how I met Babalon.  
  
In hollowing out the city they unspooled its entrails through the mountain. The emptiness filled with refuse. That suited Babalon just fine.  
  
Babalon does things to the empty places, to the corpses inside. She takes families of skeletons and sits them at their dinner tables. She fires the rotten food left in the pantry and lays a vile spread, ties bibs to the parents and the children, and lays out silverware. She portions out the putrid, burnt-moldfoam of the chicken and tubers onto each dusty plate, and leaves a piece beside a table leg for the dog. When all is done, she laughs--it echoes through the quiet of the dead mountain--and leaves the family to their eternal meal.  
  
Sometimes, based on her own unknown criteria, she sets fire to the front of the domicile so that it burns itself inside and out. In those apartments that had been outfitted with gas stoves, she sometimes trips the valves and leaves a burning bit of tinder inside.  
  
Babalon says that arson is the oldest form of artistic expression.

 

 

~2~

 

My earliest memory is of a membrane being peeled away from my eyes and the sensation of a long tube being expelled from my throat. There was a woman with magnifying glasses looking down at me, prying open my eyelids with thick black gloves.  
  
"Alive," she said. The Maker stepped into view.  
  
We called him the Maker because this was how his assistants referred to him. There were other Makers in the mountain, but he was the only one we ever saw. He looked like us, a "drak-onid," which seems to be a sort of lizard-sapient that goes about on two legs instead of four. But this connection did not endear us to the Maker; we were, I came to realize, disposable.  
  
"Your Designation is N7652," he said. "Repeat."  
  
"N7652." I spoke the designation and spat up chunks of tissue, phlegm, and growth-tank fluid. My vocal cords had never been used.  
  
"Starting light test." The woman held up something that blinded me. Avoid staring into the sun, the Guide told me, though I did not understand the nature of the Guide yet, and took it to be a person speaking closeby. "Adequate response. Follow my finger." I observed the woman's gloved digit weave figure-eights. "Adequate."  
  
"Get it up and have it walk," the Maker said. I was made to hobble to the closest wall and return. I saw my growth-tank for the first time: a combination of water pump and womb. I was shaking terribly and tried to grab the woman's long lab gown for support, but she stepped away. "It must stand on its own."  
  
"Activate Guide Introduction."  
  
"Welcome," the voice in my head said. "Hail the All-Father of Dragons, Father Nefarian, Benevolent King, Master of Each and Every One. This Guide”--and here it flashed a rubric of images with words tied to them--“has been gifted to you, valued and beloved Child of the All-Father, so that you may better advance the course of the Grand Harmony."  
  
"Sit it down while the Guide runs the first four lessons," I heard the Maker say, distantly, and felt a hand guide me across the room.  
  
But my attention was consumed by the Guide. Dragon. The All-Father. Black-dragons. Children of the All-Father. Drakonid: Beloved second children of the All-Father. Me. Azeroth. The World: I saw the blue-green surface of something small, yet immense. Gifted to his Children by the All-Father, wrongly usurped by Imperialist Aggressors.  
  
That was the basic construction of our world: everyone who followed the All-Father was a Child or second Child and so on, and everyone who did not was a Villainous Stranger, a Putrid Usurper, and our Enemy. The closest Enemies were the Dark Iron dwarves in their city of Thaurissan, ruled by an Emperor of the same name, who had allied themselves with a fire-beast known as Ragnaros. The original occupants of the mountain, I would learn after the destruction; but at the time I knew them only as the Strangers that swarmed the halls below us. They would be cast out during the First Conquest. The Second Conquest would follow. The city of "Storm-wind." The Guide once knew of it. City Streets. Diagrams of drainage ditches and moats, now turned to mush in my mind. The Third Conquest: "Khaz Modan." Scratched out pictures, no words. The Guide became addled after the invasion.  
  
The invaders came from outside the Mountain. The invaders were enemies, two warring factions, but they joined together to slaughter every Child of the All-Father, and every servant of the Emperor.  
  
The siege was a months-long campaign, waged in brutal tunnel and room-to-room battles across the hundreds of miles of mountain-innards. Rations became sparser, and then disappeared. The upper mountain was in disarray. The Maker became agitated, neglecting our basic tutelage in favor of combat drilling. I remember when a general came to the rookery and demanded of him that processing be expedited. The Maker protested, but the All-Father needed us. The Guide lessons were forgotten. We slept little; were fed potent experimental growth serums that killed half the brood and left the rest of us, according to the words of the woman with the black gloves, "stunted."  
  
When the invaders finally hollowed out the Mountain and left everyone dead, I was left with only the Guide. I imagined it looking something like the books of the lower city--all torn and burnt pages. Sometimes the holes in the Guide are so large--the thundering "Data Deficient" so stern--that my nose begins to run and my eyes water. The remaining images became confused. The presence of Babalon accelerated the decay. Her attentions disturbed the calm of the dead mountain, reinvigorating it only to remind it of its demise. The mountain began to die all over again.

 

 

~3~

 

Babalon came after the invasion, after everyone was killed. I was foraging for rats near the prison block when I heard new noises. I crept onto one of the wide parade routes of the lower city and saw her there, scooping the eyes out of a magma-giant that had died defending a gate. The fires of the rock-thing had gone out, and it looked like a huge infant made of coal gone to sleep against a wall.  
  
I approached her because the Guide had no words to describe her. No Protocols floated up to respond. She ignored me, leapt down off the corpse, considering the huge gemstone eyes she held. She scraped them against the smooth wall of the concourse and drew a crude, glittering representation of male genitalia.  
  
"I'll call it, 'Sadomasochistic Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder: A Daguerreotype Love-Story."

Babalon says things that sound like this all the time.

It had been long since I'd heard another voice, and hers was loud and sonorous-harsh. It was pain. I imagined the sounds filling up my skull, pushing my eyes out from behind and this new person using them to draw things on the guts of the mountain. I covered my hearing membranes and staggered away from her.

"What an interesting little lizard-thing," she trumpeted, "What is your name?"

"N7652." The Protocol pulled the designation from me. I had not been commanded since the invasion. Had not heard such voices demand things of me since the frightful times. I knew terror again, as I knew it when the invaders came and emptied-refilled the city.

"What an odd name," she said, rocking as she stepped. "I am Babalon."

I backed away from her, and felt the hard metal of the great gate behind me. This Babalon--this apparition--knew the Protocols, it seemed. She towered over me and pressed her hands flat against the gate.

"How many people are left down here, En?"

"No people."

"How many monsters are left down here, En?"

"Few."

"Few?" Her breathing ransacked the catalog of knowledge infused in me, the Guide, bringing up the unasked words Ash and Brine and Acrid which had--without context--been implanted in my memory. So long without the Maker's guidance had turned it into a thing of amnesia that robbed me of my minutes and hours and fled with the restful part of my sleep. After the invasion I tamped down the impulses and confusing noises with long spans of inaction, lying still until the dust began to cover me and the noises grew quiet. Soon I had to venture out for food, and found myself alone. It had been a long period of silence. But the new apparition which called itself Babalon had reinvigorated the tormenting organ inside of me.

"Answer me, this few," she demanded, striking my left hearing membrane with a heavy hand. Ruptured tympanic membrane should be covered to prevent infection. The Guide only remembered things in the moment. "Answer me, En."

"Few beasts. Fire-things, Changed-things. Golem. Salamander." There were other creatures still inside the mountain, animals, but they were growing fewer. "So many died or fled," I said, falling in and out of a time and place. The mountain had been utterly ransacked, so violent was the invasion. I was marooned somewhere else, beneath the spasmotic urges of the Guide, beyond the mountain that was the world that was the universe, and Babalon would not let me go.

"There is no one else?" she asked. "Just you, little one? How old are you?"

"I do not know," I said. "There is no time." The mountain never changes.

Babalon laughed, and let go of my head. I was equalizing; the rattling in my mind went still.

Babalon threw out her arms. "Then this place is mine."

Babalon has black balls for eyes, crossed with bright amber bars and flecked with dust. They rotate in each socket independently, so one line might be horizontal while the other is vertical. The lines remind me of an image in the Guide of "stars," arranged in a "galaxy," a cluster of bright monochromatic lights against black canvas.

Babalon's galaxy-eyes make it so you can never tell whether she is looking at you or not, but I began to learn the feeling of her gaze.

Babalon is a heap of disparate parts. Pangolin scales on her brow and scalp. Horse hooves. Ram horns. Galaxy eyes. Lizard tail. Skin of pomegranate red. She struts through the ashen boulevards of the mountain cursing, defacing, vandalizing the dead, who are unable to protest her activities.

After I met her I tried to ask the Guide what she was. It returned "Eredar," and "Data Deficient."  
  
Data Deficient means the Guide does not know about a thing. The Guide did not know about Babalon.  
  
All I knew was that she was Babalon.

 

 

~4~

 

The Black Barrel Tavern became one of her longest-running projects. Corpses and skeletons brought in from all over the city. Finery ransacked from the upscale boutiques of the aristocratic terraces. She ripped the gowns to leave empty tree-knot breasts tastefully exposed in the style of high-society orgies; festooned crotches and chairs with jabbing, phallic objects. She arranged the bodies like mannequins using spears stabbed anus to crown, or wrapped in wire. Dancing, chatting, lounging, kissing. She intermingled the corpses of invaders from both the factions here and there, to give the place a more cosmopolitan, cultured feel, she said.

"In the wasteland outside, you'd never see all of them together like this," she said once, fixing decorative wine-corks into eye sockets. "They'd sooner eat each other. But here? Finally equalized. Finally fixed."

She is especially fond of what she calls, "interspecies dynamics." She refers to them as, "Name slash name," where the slash refers to a cross shape. Human slash orc. Elf slash troll. Tauren slash gnome. She knots together poker players' legs and arms, bodies growing into bodies like polyps. That was the first time I started to suspect the mountain was becoming flesh; the way the bodies sank into the upholstery and into each other. I shook the images away; assumed it was the decay of the Guide in my head. Babalon did not notice.  
  
"A Stiff Drink," she said, tapping her chin. "That's what we'll call this one. Nice and pithy. The whole affair is really about declaring victory over decay. Poignant, yet vain. What do you think, En?"

I was perched on the bar where Babalon had given me a boost, my legs dangling off the edge. The two stools next to me sported priceless golden axe handles converted into stimulation devices. "Okay."

Okay is a word I learned from a book. It means: okay. The useful thing about this word is that it seems to make the listener think… whatever they want to think. I say it to Babalon, because no matter what I say, she usually says whatever she wants. And it also seems to say that the speaker is good, without being too good, and not bad, without being too bad. Medium.

"Of course!" she cried, and took up an axe and swung at the head of a high-society woman. Her skull went into the wine racks behind me and shattered a dozen bottles. Babalon laughed her singing, discordant laugh, and her galaxy-eyes rolled unheeded.

 

 

~5~

 

The Maker made us learn things.

"The Guide is binary," he would say. "The Protocols dynamic." The Guide could only give us information. The transfer was singular. We had to learn what to do with that information.

"Iron Dwarf," the woman with the black gloves said.

The template picture flashed across my eyes. A slate grey creature with dark black hair. A mild electrical shock was applied to my temples and crotch.

"Iron Dwarf." The pain repeated.

Later: handed spears. Led to target dummies. Instructed to stab, twist, withdraw, repeat. We are uncertain.

"Enemies of the All-Father," the Maker said. "Iron Dwarf." The lancing pain. The girl next to me spasmed as though run through the side. "Kill the Enemy." The dummy was overlaid in my head with the image of the Iron Dwarf. Stab, twist, withdraw, repeat.

We learned how to stab things. Those that refused, or broke, went away.

 

 

~6~

 

Babalon says that she has a "love-hate relationship," with the Grand Arena, the huge fighting stadium where the dwarves pitted prisoners, gladiators, and exotic beasts in bloodsport and judicial trials. Those things still-living in the deeps became subjects which Babalon corralled into the prison cells of the Arena.

She announces the day's fights over the boom-horns that amplify sound out across the canyons of the lower city. A decrepit golem versus a mind-rotted troll berserker. A wasting fire elemental against a six-legged spider-beast. Babalon filled every spectator seat with mummified bodies displayed together in parodies of sexual congress.  
  
"It is imperative," she once explained to me, as she carefully arranged a dwarf, orc, and human in a kind of triad, "that none of them seem attentive towards what is happening in the arena. The contenders must understand that what they are doing is essentially meaningless. That they are the observers." She contemplated the arrangement of the bone-and-skin arms of the former orc, making tiny adjustments. "The height and downfall of a civilization correlates strongly with the breakdown of social mores. Here we see the ultimate expression of that breakdown--the fulfillment of intercourse achieved only in the presence, but not attention, of bloodshed. Violence has become the unwitting aphrodisiac. The individuals killing each other are the real attendees."

She traipsed over to the high tribunal seat that once hosted emperors and kings, throwing herself down heavily. She pulled the huge, rusted lever by the armrest and shouted into a speaking-horn: "LET THE GAMES BEGIN!"

Rusty gates flew open at either end of the arena. A troglodytic salamander, its skin pale and plagued, slithered from the nearest, while a debased ogre-mutant covered in scar-tissue trotted out of the other. It rushed for the salamander, grunting and heaving, and was met by a ferocious counter-charge from the serpent-thing, which pushed it to the ground. They tussled, biting and tearing.

Babalon found me a little chair for sitting next to her during the arena games. She says I am her, "fearless assistant," at such times. The ogre-thing and salamander bit and bit each other. This went on for a long time, the arena quiet except for painful yells from the ogre, hissing from the salamander, and the wet smack of bodies against sand. Babalon sighed theatrically and itched at her right breast. She looked around at the seats of the coliseum, ten thousand bodies immobile in ecstasy, and frowned.

"It's just not working yet," she said, and stood up to leave. I had nowhere to go, and did not want to follow her, so I politely watched the salamander kill the ogre, consume the corpse, and then die as it retched up everything it ate.

 

 

~7~

 

The upper-reaches--it was there that I was brought into this mountain, and there that all my brothers and sisters died in the invasion.

The bones and bodies of dragon and dragon-spawn still litter the place, along with the orcs who helped them in their war against the fire-things and the dwarves and humans of the below.  
  
Babalon became consumed with the hatcheries. She cracked open nearly every egg to get to each whelpling body inside. The best eggs coughed up fetuses almost untouched by the passage of time. They appeared to be asleep. Babalon found crates of copper wire somewhere and dragged them into the hatcheries. She plundered scaffolding and tied long strands to the ceiling, and from them she hung the bodies and bones of the whelplings.

The flock grew to over a thousand spread out across a dozen vaulted halls with only a tenth of the remaining eggs cracked open. Embryo. Yolk. Albumen. Children of the All-Father of Dragons. The Maker never mentioned the connection between them and myself, but I now know they were my brothers and sisters. When Babalon decided to pin some to the walls, she made me hold the ladder.

 

~8~

 

I survived because I disobeyed Protocol. I survived because I hid.

I was brought up in the waning days of the invasion, as the invaders called Alliance and Horde ransacked the mountain and divided the forces of the All-Father and the Iron Emperor. We might have combined our forces to push them back, but their numbers were too great, and I can recollect no Protocols decreeing anything except hatred for the dwarf-things and any who held allegiance to them.

There was fighting in the west hall, and a Blackhand captain was arguing with the Maker to arm us and send us out to fight. The Maker said he needed us to destroy sensitive material that could not fall into enemy hands. The Blackhand captain struck and killed the Maker and issued a Stand Down order before we could react, because he knew the Protocol-words, and then ordered us to prepare for battle.

There was a terrible banging on the chamber door, and the Blackguards moved to intercept, but were too late. The door exploded in a ball of fire and in came a man with wild blonde hair, incanting terrible words and summoning blue fire from his hands. The Blackguard captain ordered us forward. I went backward.

Phantom pains of electrical shock in my skull and hands and genitals. The real-unreal Protocol. It hurt so much to disobey, but something had tripped within my mind. I ripped the siding from a chimney shaft and darted inside. I watched as soldiers swept into the room, killing drakonid and orc alike, and I watched as something huge--tauren, Highguarde, bull, the Guide said--knocked the captain down with a pillar of stone and bashed his chest into paste. Catastrophic organ damage, cannot resuscitate. I climbed and shimmied through ventilation shafts, cutting myself to shreds on old metal and stone; finally, I collapsed and listened.

The mountain took many weeks to die.

When I emerged the silence had only started. Machines still plodded on in the depths of the city, but slowly these died, too. Steam-furnaces destroyed whole blocks, and magma-spillways malfunctioned and flooded the lower slums. The invaders had followed Protocols of their own: Retrieve everything of value, torch the rest. Fires everywhere. Bodies had been heaped to burn, but this quickly ceased. Most were left for the rats and dust. In the dark spaces it looked like hundreds of people lying unconscious. I slept among them, for fear of sleeping alone.

 

~9~

 

Babalon would not let me anywhere near the Tribunal Annex, the highest reaches of the city. It was there that the All-Father had his abode. We never saw him, for there were many of us and he could not lavish us individually. It was there, too, that I suspected he had been killed or cornered; for the bones of the first Children, his dragons, became more numerous in the atriums before the Annex. She told me to never go up there or she would kill me and suck the marrow from my bones; and sometimes she disappeared into that place for days on end and returned strangely elated.

 

 

~10~

 

The Grand Imperial Court became one of Babalon's favorite projects. The throne room of the Irons was too huge, too ostentatious, for her to ignore. The discovery of the Emperor's corpse was a gift from the heavens, in her terms. At first she tried various methods of crucifixion, but the advanced state of decay meant that the body was soon little more than bones in robes.  
  
"This room needs to reflect the transition from republic to dictatorship," Babalon said. This reflection was best manifested in what she called the Supplication of the Oligarchs. This meant we had to retrieve every dead senator we could find. These men could be identified by their brown robes, though Babalon found extras somewhere, and told me to put them on any dwarf corpse that would fit. We soon had about five hundred, and each had to be carefully arranged in the chamber so that they were prostrating themselves away from the throne, five hundred bony buttocks facing the crowned skeleton on the dais.  
  
She called it, "Aristocratic Worship as Expressed by the Ruler-Slave Slave-Ruler Dominated Environment."  
  
Each project-name seemed to be longer and more complicated than the last.  
  
"We could steal pillows from manors on the third terrace, form makeshift rears," she said, seated upon the armrest of the throne.  
  
I asked why we were putting all the skeletons like this.  
  
"To represent the nature of the relationship between ruler and ruling class," she said, speaking with large, looping movements of her hands. "The Emperor derived all his power from the patronage of the city's lordly class, who in turn made their wealth possible through the peasants. The nonconsensual buggery of the mouths and asses of the poor!" She stamped the floor; her hoof echoed too-loud in the long court. "You see, En, it's supposed to appear as though the senators are offering their asses for the Emperor. This perversion exemplifies both the depravity of the aristocracy and the parasitic, doomed relationship the governance of the city entered into with itself."  
  
She tugged at her horns the way she did when she was thinking. "We could theoretically try to hollow out the lava core of the mountain, find the lord of the fire elementals, and make it so the Emperor is offering his ass to him... no, no, that's thinking too big for now." She picked her nose. "Until then, I think we could tear the whole floor out of this room and ransack some conveyor belts from the manufactory. That way, we could have Thaurissan's corpse ride around on a circuit. Once the pillows are installed, a simple lever system would press his face against every ass…"  
  
I discovered that sometimes it is best to just walk away and let Babalon, "Talk it out," to herself, as she says.  
  
I began to worry that Babalon was talking to the mountain.  
  
I began to fear that the mountain was listening.

 

 

~11~

 

The mountain's ways were unknown to me at first. The floor-plans locked in the Guide could not be trusted. Lava flows, cave-ins, mechanical failures, and unexplained shifts of the stone meant I had to memorize the paths myself. But Babalon seemed to know the mountain the moment she appeared. She is precisely where she wants to be, is never lost, and is never truly missing. The still-ticking clocks that adorn the walls of palace square could turn a hundred times without a sighting of her, when suddenly, she appears, dragging me to the next project. She never tells me to leave, only when to come. How she finds me I do not know; even when I hide myself away in some forgotten corner of the city, she is there, shaking me awake.  
  
Once, when the Guide became so loud that I could not stand the sight of the mountain, I fled to those chimney tunnels I'd found refuge in when all was madness and despair. I slumbered until I heard a distant voice calling to me. When I climbed out she was there, waiting for me, angry, her galaxy-eyes rolling.  
  
"Where have you been? What were you doing up in those chutes? Don't you know they're dangerous? I was worried sick."  
  
"The noise," I said, my mouth dry. Persistent headache. Dehydration. Seek empty spaces. The Guide filled with holes I could not plug. "It woudln't stop." I said.  
  
"The voices?" She frowned. She calls it, "voices." She knelt down, stuck fingers into my eyelids and pried them open to peer inside, like the black-gloved woman used to. I let her do so. She's strong, and I am used to being molded. She wrapped her arms around me. A new gesture. She brushed her hand over my scalp, the space between my small horns. "Can you hear them now?"  
  
"They are quiet."  
  
"Good, good." She rocks back and forth. "It's all right."  
  
"Okay."

 

 

~12~

 

Babalon became taken with the ogres that died defending the upper reaches from the invaders. "Their bodies are perfect," she said. One of her most ambitious projects. She called it, "The Masculine Hysteria Present in the Abstraction of the Feminine."  
  
A gigantic oval suspended across one of the high terrace canyons, dropping far, far below into old wolf warrens and slum stacks. Mangled ogre bodies formed the primary O of the sculpture. She scalped the dyed heads of trolls and glued them around the edges in clumps. She suspended a red dragon's head, eyeless, its tongue a grey block of soapstone, at the uppermost point of the circle. "It floats, you see, the labia-dentata beckoning the onlooker." She worked on scaffolding so thin and so precarious I expected her to fall at any moment. She found a catapult somewhere, dragged it to a balcony five blocks away, slaughtered a spider-mutant from the arena-pens, and brought the dismembered parts for ammunition.  
  
"Ideally, we'd set up a kind of giant, metallic phallus, and have it saw back and forth into the ovoid," she said, covered in blood and bile, loading chunks of rock and spider into the sling, "but that's not feasible until we can clear the roof of all obstructions for the machinery. In the meantime, this will be an accurate stand-in for ejaculate. It has the added perk of forcing the observer to interact with the exhibit, making them a complicit actor in the exhibit, rather than merely a witness." She pulled the lever. The shot sailed wide. "Good Art," she said to me, "must always be agile and adaptable." The next shot sailed straight through. "Something in the back, maybe? To simulate fertilization? Perhaps a dead giant…"

 

 

~13~

 

Babalon grew angry with what she called, "The limitations of the dead." She filled a stately public park on the second terrace with glass specimen tanks pilfered from an alchemical laboratory, and stuffed remains into them. "The amount of materials on hand are spectacular, but everything is just so… static," she said, selecting one of the hundreds of vials gathered on the slate-grey moss. She mixed and poured the contents into several tanks. Skeletons popped, hissed, and began to render. "Think of what could be done in a display with movement. The possibilities are limitless." One of the tanks exploded, scattering burning formaldehyde across the green. Babalon tilted her head and laughed. "Emergent Art! Remember, En, there is no narrative superior to the unexpected!"  
  
I was holding an armful of glass vials that might become volatile at any moment. All I could think about was how I needed to go to the bathroom. "Okay."

 

 

~14~

 

The Children of the All-Father called the mountain "Blackrock." The Dark Irons called it by another name, in their block-rune tongue, that translated: "Invincible Nation of the Mountain."  
  
I started calling it “Black Mountain.”  
  
Mountain. Tree. Stone. Ocean. Grass. Images stuck to membrane. Imaginary things. Fraying paper. The Guide could not help me escape the Black Mountain. Everything else was immaterial. Safer to interpret that which is known to exist. I knew everything beyond what was present to my eyes as a black, sucking void. The rock of the Black Mountain was just a simple sheen of texture hiding a black expanse, a thing that would render me into constituent parts and then down and down to the atomic level of being. The blackness outside throbbed through the walls like the pulsing of arteries.  
  
I began to picture the collapsing thoroughfares as intestines. The storehouses became guts, and the forges calcified glands. The organs of a great creature killed by invading pathogens. Babalon's Art could not slow the inevitable. The villi were dead, and yet she moved them in mimicry of what was. I turned corners and briefly perceived the walls as meat. I blinked again and they were rock. It began to happen more often. Oil oozed from dead machines and became putrefying feces. Pillars collapsed as ligaments seized. The Black Mountain choked and engorged as it observed the process of its own ultimate death, and I begin to see eyes forming out of the meat-walls. I felt their gazes following me until I turned, and found only the stone of the un-dead mountain.  
  
I no longer wanted to touch any surfaces, for fear that they might grow maws swallow me alive.

 

 

~15~

 

"The problem with people is that they expect art to always be purely ingenious. They want value, something that implies a palpability of labor. It always has to be new. It's the difference between the pornographic and the sublime," she said, affixing razorblades to an erect clay phallus. The orc woman's mummified remains wore colonel's armor; Babalon had seated her in an old barber's chair she'd dragged into a tiny public park. Various corpses were draped around the chair in supplication. She was having me stick razorblades through their papery cheeks.  
  
"The public has a masturbatory mindset. They want titillation, but they also want an oblique reminder of the hedonism that is destroying them. Most artists go one way or the other. They offer either pure fulfillment of the bourgeois desires, or they attack them bitterly. It is only when we do both that we can find the source of the guilt inherent in the civilized man, and allow it to commit suicide. Auto-erotic asphyxiation of the decadent society. The highest expression of Art."  
  
She took several steps back, framing the scene with her thumbs and forefingers. "Hmmpf. What do you think?"  
  
"I think it is okay."  
  
"But does it really capture the immateriality of the proceedings? The self-loathing of the participants? I mean… could her wang be bigger?" She leaned down and patted me on the head. "You can run along, dear. I have lots of work to do before this one's done."  
  
Nothing I said to Babalon seemed to make a difference. No Protocol, no Guide to script her motions.  
  
Whoever was the Maker of Babalon did a very poor job.

 

 

~16~

 

The streets slowly filled with corpses locked in various forms of ecstasy and agony. Babalon called these "ambiance." Bodies on benches, in storefront windows, craning out over balconies, dead people in twos and threes and fours propped up with metal and wires.  
  
"Sex and war are the two purest expressions of the animal condition," she explained to me, lashing bodies together back-to-back and throwing them into a sluggish lava-canal that cut through one of the lower terraces. "It's only natural that this motif shows up constantly in all great Art."  
  
I asked Babalon why living things--animals, the rich, the poor--were so interested in sex.  
  
Her tone recalled the sort the Maker adopted during verbal lessons. "In sex, as in war, the psychological and physical battles occur simultaneously," she said cheerily, selecting fireworks liberated from an uptown festival-shop, pushing them indelicately into the mouths of the desiccated bodies.  
  
"The plebeian is highly interested in vulgarity, operating in a state of near-constant arousal, which is why they are so desperate to censor art even as it confronts that which they desire most. The bourgeois desires I've mentioned. Therefore, in a visual, vulgarized culture, Art must aspire to be even more shocking, even louder, than that which stimulates the sexual urges of the plebeians." She hurled the corpses into the canal, where they bobbed and burned for a few moments, and then exploded in brilliant blasts of orange and green. She tapped the tips of her fingers against the points of her horns. "Needs work," she said.  
  
I asked the Guide if I was supposed to seek something or someone out, to have sex with them, since according to Babalon, this was what all living beings desired.

The Guide said: "As one of the Children of the All-Father, you have been blessed with freedom from all carnal desires, and have neither the need, nor ability, to seek out copulation with your peers, or members of any other species. This boon ensures that all brothers and sisters of the Black Dragonflight can focus all efforts on mercilessly defeating the wicked renegades and traitors to the Dear All-Father."  
  
The Guide told me this as I stared out over the magma lakes from a palace balcony once reserved for the Emperor and his concubines alone. For a time I had enjoyed sleeping there, as it was quiet, warm, and secluded. But on the occasion that I asked the Guide this question I noticed a change: above the shrunken body of a courtesan scratched into the wall were the words: "To Do List," and an arrow pointing down at her.  
  
Babalon had claimed my overlook, as she had claimed the whole Black Mountain, and me, even as everything threatened to fold in on itself.  
  
Something was going to happen. I did not have to wait long.

 

 

~17~

 

Babalon sent me to forage for gold teeth in the prison blocks when I heard them, my senses hyper-tuned for such loudness in the deeps.  
  
"We've been turned around," a gruff voice said.  
  
"It's up," a woman’s nasal-sounding voice said. "We just need to go up."  
  
"We need to circle back." Another woman, her voice almost a snarl. "We need to--" Sniffing. The tiny hiss of a knife being drawn. Something big loped silently around the corner and knocked me down, hard.  
  
The Guide said: Wolf. But this was not a wolf, it walked upright and held a knife to my mouth. I appended "wolf-woman" to the entry.  
  
"Do you have a designation?" I asked the grey wolf-woman.  
  
"Caught a kobold," she snapped. Footsteps approached. More faces. A goblin woman with short hair and a chopped-off nose that ended abruptly in a flat, shiny surface. A dwarf with breath like rotting gums and chewing tobacco. His eyes were mismatched and misplaced in his skull, and his cheeks were covered in deep knots of pox scars. Rarely did I know fear in the mountain of other living things, for I could always run and hide, but these new people frightened me in ways that reminded me of the first wasting days of the post-invasion, when packs of mutated fire-things and rock-things roamed the tunnels eradicating one another, finishing the job of the outsiders.  
  
"This is no kobold," he said, turning my head from side to side. "Maker's Name, this is a drakonid."  
  
The goblin woman spun around. "Where there's one, there's more."  
  
"The Maker had a name?" I asked.  
  
"It's barely grown," the wolf-woman said.  
  
The dwarf pointed his sword at me. "No tricks, spawn. How many of you are left down here?"  
  
"My brothers and sisters are all gone."  
  
"Have you been down here alone this whole time?" The fur on the wolf-woman's neck was standing down.  
  
"Not likely," the goblin said. "You think one little spawn did all those corpse-statues we've been seeing?"  
  
"Babalon," I said. "Babalon did those."  
  
The dwarf leaned in. "Who? Who is Babalon?"  
  
"She makes all the Art."  
  
"What does she look like?"  
  
"Tall. Red. Horns. Hooves."  
  
The wolf-woman let go of me. I saw that each of them wore black armor. I appended them as "people-in-black." They looked at each other.  
  
The wolf said: "You don't think?"  
  
"You're coming with us," the dwarf said, grabbing me by the arm. "This way."  
  
The wolf-woman and the dwarf bore me away. I was used to being moved around, altered. The Black Mountain had not yet noticed these new entities, these new invaders. But the eyes were swiveling towards us. I wondered where Babalon was.  
  
We fled the prison block and rode the great chains of the central caldera into the borderlands of the upper and lower cities. It was there that all three actors in the invasion had first met in battle.  
  
The Guide was becoming reinvigorated in my mind: each time I saw the goblin up ahead, peering around corners or sneaking up flights of stairs, it stuttered something about trade princes and cartels. The frightful dwarf with the corpse-breath kept recalling Khaz Modan and Second Conquest, and vague notions of learned hate. The wolf-woman merited only a repeated, "The common wolf is native to most environs of the continent… Data Deficient."  
  
They grew tired of carrying my weight, though I was slighter than the dwarf and a fraction of the wolf-woman, and allowed me to run beside them as long as they could clasp my shoulders. I asked them why they were here.  
  
"We can't tell you."  
  
"Who are you?"  
  
"No names."  
  
"Where have you come from?"  
  
"That's classified."  
  
Their Guides, I thought, must be malfunctioning, too.  
  
I was pulled and prodded through the lower reaches of the All-Father's once-domain, where drakonid, orc, troll, and ogre corpses mingled with those of the invaders. They pulled me into a dormitory, and the goblin closed the door behind us.  
  
Three more people-in-black. A human man, older. A blue-skinned elf woman with green, dreadlocked hair. The Guide returned: "--ght Elf." I substituted "blue elf." And a purple-man who looked like Babalon.  
  
"What in the world is that?" the elf said.  
  
"Cap'an, lookee what I found." The dwarf pinched me in place by the neck. "Now, don't worry, he ain't going anywhere. Last lizard standing, eh?"  
  
The purple-man spoke. His voice was melodious and calming. "How have you survived in this place for so long, child?"  
  
"It ain't a child," the goblin hissed, stepping away from everyone else. "You don't grow kids in vats and tubes."  
  
"I eat the rats," I said, which was true. "I don't go near the lava."  
  
"Smart little bugger, inn't it?" the dwarf said. "They trained 'em to fight the Dark Irons. Me brother seen them in the war."  
  
"A liability," the human man said, looking at with me with a kind of cold sadness.  
  
"We have to get it out of here," the elf said. "If it's the last of its kind…"  
  
"You and your bleeding heart." The Dwarf gestured at the elf with two upturned fingers against his throat. "Do you realize what this thing's brain must know? About Deathwing? About Wrathion?"  
  
"He's got a point," the goblin said. I was not familiar with either of these words, nor was the Guide; but I did not voice this, as the people-in-black seemed busy.  
  
"We get the bit we're here for, we get this, we get out, we get every bloody accolade 'n the books," the dwarf said.  
  
"The target is the least of our problems now," the wolf-woman interrupted. "Captain, we are not alone. There is another."  
  
"Who?"  
  
"Tell him. Tell him what you told us, now."  
  
"Babalon?"  
  
The purple man's shoulders hunched imperceptibly. He knelt down before me. "Tell me, what is your name?"  
  
"En."  
  
"En, my name is Augustus."  
  
"Are you sure that's wise?" the human said. Augustus paid him no attention.  
  
"En, what does this woman look like?"  
  
"She resembles you, only taller." I searched for the words. "Face tendrils. Plated skull. No hair. Hooves. Red skin."  
  
Augustus nodded. "Has this woman been here long?" I started to answer, but paused; for a moment I thought I saw eyes in the walls. The Black Mountain had been made aware. Already I could feel the distant churning of the mountain-guts against the blackness.  
  
The dwarf said: "Where is she now?"  
  
"She comes and goes." I shrugged. "She could be anywhere." The people-in-black cast darting looks around us.  
  
"Minor parameter change," the human said. "We should proceed as planned."  
  
"What about the spawn?" the elf asked.  
  
The dwarf put his hands on my shoulders. He talked too closely, too comfortably. "Listen, spawn. We need to get to the Tribunal Annex. Do you know the way?"  
  
"I do."  
  
"I have the chart memorized," the goblin sneered.  
  
"Damn your chart! Its years old! Cave-ins have altered everything--"  
  
"And with this… Babalon, to contend with," the wolf-woman growled. "How do you know this creature won't lead us right to the man'ari?"  
  
Appended Eredar entry: Man'ari.  
  
"You believe it can lead us there?" Augustus said.  
  
"This one's fresh," the dwarf said. "Barely conditioned. They'll listen to whoever's ordering them. If you know the Protocols, you can get them to do whatever you want." He stared at me between the eyes. "Minion, State Designation."  
  
The old pull. The shock-urge to the hands and nose and groin. "N7652."  
  
"Unit N7652, Locate Tribunal Annex."  
  
"Yes," I coughed, stalking towards the closest stairwell. The people-in-black followed me.  
  
I wondered where Babalon was. I wondered about these new people, how I felt safe-unsafe with them, but unsafe-safe with her. I did not know which was preferable.

 

 

~18~

 

They took me back out into the city. The changes were happening faster. Across the lava chutes below us I saw a thin film; a membrane. Only an alteration of the light. The stone of the mountain slid, shifted.

  
"Tremors," the wolf woman said.  
  
They were wrong. It was the mountain digesting all the bodies Babalon had thrown into its blood. The mountain was regenerating-degenerating.  
  
They ranged out and behind me in a loose circle, Augustus bringing up the front.  
  
We moved softly through the burnt lean-tos of the orcs that had once served the All-Father. Thousands of them had camped atop the roofs of the upper city. The execution blocks remained in place at certain intervals, where they had beheaded those orcs found guilty of, "Worshipping the old spirits of Draenor." The Guide was silent on the matter. The Guide was silent on many things.  
  
We weren't far. Rookeries, the training halls, the laboratories, the high-security cells, and the Annex. The enormity of what I was doing--that I was leading invaders to the house of the All-Father--suddenly struck me. I doubled over in pain in the middle of a four-way intersection leading up in two directions, babbling, "Do not touch the walls. They are made of meat."  
  
"What's he going on about?" the goblin yelped.  
  
"Quiet," Augustus whispered.  
  
I felt her before I saw her; her presence ballooning through the solid-unsolid places of the mountain.  
  
Babalon appeared at the top of the incline. "En, En!?" she called, frantic. "En, where--" Her galaxy eyes expanded; she screamed: "Who are you!? Get away from him!" And then, more quietly: "Are you here for the tour? Or… for the auditions!?"  
  
"Elune's breath," the blue elf gasped.  
  
"Why is she naked!?" the goblin screeched.  
  
"She's mine," the wolf-woman snarled, striding towards the lip of the incline. "Go!"  
  
The dwarf grabbed my neck and I was borne away. We heard only the groaning of the mountain and the sound of our feet as we broke past open doors and forgotten munitions depots, up a winding staircase as a terrible sound echoed up from behind us: a high, ululating scream, halting immediately; followed by an authoritative and wet drum-skin snap.  
  
The presence of these new free-radicals had upset the mountain's death even worse than Babalon's ministrations. I felt the blackness beneath the stone shivering under my feet; the walls shining with amniotic fluid. The mountain had become a growth tank with dead things inside. The blackness made treaty with the meat, becoming a kind of ink-covered flesh. I heard it the way I heard the Guide inside my head, but the mountain had no words, only the subterranean throb as the darkness outside came in, squeezing the flesh inward. The people-in-black pushed me through the rookeries, gazing up in awe at the thousands of dead whelplings surrounding them.  
  
"This is a nightmare," the goblin said, "Who did all this?"  
  
"Babalon," I said. The throbbing in my brain. The whelpings who were my brothers and sisters. I helped Babalon pin them to the walls. Ulcers on the innards of the mountain.  
  
The dwarf shook me. "Which way?"  
  
"Here, of all places," Augustus said distantly, shaking his head. "How could this have happened?"  
  
The goblin's anger escalated. "Why didn't we have any intel? What did you know?" She pointed her short-sword at Augustus. The dwarf drew his knife.  
  
Augustus kept still. "We have our objective. We knew there would be elements we could not prepare for. We move forward."  
  
"We're one-down on a retrieval black-cloak with no support option, and you're prepared to go up against that thing?" She lowered her sword. "Is this a personal vendetta?"

Augustus' face was unreadable.  
  
There was animalistic shrieking and crashing somewhere below us. "No more last-man standing," the dwarf said, grabbing me roughly by the arm. "Order: lead us to the Annex!"  
  
The compulsion trilled in my head as I led them through the final atriums, where the bodily remains became huge heaps of charred carbon and fused armor. The blackness-meat bubbled up from them, begging attention. The Tribunal Annex lay beyond a fifty-foot gate emblazoned with the faces of a hundred dead Emperors. I had never seen it. It was red-lit, like that of the magma below--but this light came from beyond. I had never stepped through the door; the only part of the mountain Babalon had forbidden me.  
  
The Annex was a hundred yards wide, giving way to crumbling rock and red fog. The red fog. The sulfurous smell of the lower city; it had become bitter, now intolerably colder. The Annex shot far out into the distance, so far that the fog obscured its endpoint. The chasm beside us was so large that I could not determine its edges or outline.  
  
"I've never been so happy to see that red sky," the elf said.  
  
"Can we make it down the side?" the goblin asked.  
  
The dwarf pulled me through the obscuring fog ahead of them as we trotted towards the median of the Annex. "Not until we find the... Oh, Makers..."  
  
As it first resolved itself out of the red fog, I thought the wing-tips were the points of huge fingers. It was only when we reached the base that the size was truly apparent.  
  
"Should have cast it over the side when they had the chance," the human whispered.  
  
Before us was the Benevolent, the All-Father of Dragons, the Rightful King, Dear Leader, for whom my brothers and sisters were to fight the fire-things and the dwarf-things and on and on until we had conquered every villainous foe. He was dead and beheaded, a skeleton on which not even a scrap of flesh remained. He had been partially suspended from the ceiling, facing the open balcony, seated on his haunches. From wingtip to wingtip he nearly filled half the parapet. Ladders and platforms climbed around the remains, and millions of tiny words had been scrimshawed into the bones, cribbed from books strewn across the floor. History, mathematics, theology, sciences.  
  
But most apparent was the bouquet of weapons sprouting from his pelvis; priceless swords, spears, and halberds clad in platinum and gold, plucked from hidden vaults and from the corpses of kings. Upon each was impaled a great hero of the Horde or the Alliance, decked in the finest armors, run through the stomachs or groins or throats, draped in agony across the bromeliad flower of weapons, their skulls and parchment-skins carefully ripped in exaggerated expressions of torment.  
  
The elf covered her mouth. "What in the name of…"  
  
"The centerpiece."  
  
Babalon stood in the entryway, partially obscured by the fog, looking up at the All-Father. "Forty were counted among those who finally defeated him, though hundreds tried before. Eighteen hours they fought. Most died. In a way, they all died. Now, impaled upon his pricks. A monument to all their sins. To the reciprocal, coital nature of the entire violent affair. To the entire, pointless, fuckfest of war. All dead, in the fulfillment of the Act." She shook her head, suddenly, potently angry. "No, no! Look away! It's not ready yet! You can't see it!"  
  
Augustus' voice turned to thunder. "Thurgood, Spanner, hold her off! U'lare, Gurni, find the target!"  
  
Everything that happened next occurred in moments that were stretched out over hours, slowed to the timespan of the mountain's contractions. The human's hands turned into fireballs. He rushed forward to meet Babalon.  
  
The goblin shot a frightened look at Babalon, at Augustus, and at the great chasm behind us. "No! Not like this! I never agreed to die here!" She raced towards the edge, and the dwarf cursed.  
  
"Damn stinking greenskin!" he spat, reaching for something on his belt. It looked like a gun, but with a wide, open barrel. He leveled it at the goblin, following her path, and pulled the trigger. I went blind. The flare exploded against the goblin's back, turning her into a fireball. She tumbled over the side and left after-burned images in her shape stamped white upon my eyes.  
  
Babalon's screech was louder and more atonal than any sound I'd ever heard an animal make. Augustus' sword had severed her right arm at the elbow. The dwarf let out a quick, barking laugh that became a shudder of air as the severed arm on the ground split open and grew teeth.  
  
I realized, to my horror, that Babalon was made out of meat.  
  
The arm grew insect legs and skittered towards Augustus, who hacked and missed and struggled as it attacked. The dwarf retreated towards the chasm and I fell to the ground when his wrist struck my neck; I saw Babalon's stump-arm changing, tearing open, as she rose up and came down upon the mage, who threw up his hands that flashed a cold, blue light.  
  
The Black Mountain seized.  
  
An ear-splitting crack somewhere above us jettisoned a plume of lava out over the chasm. Molten rock washed over the open air of the Annex and down came a wave of black smoke. There were shrieking noises in the darkness, rocks shattering.

I lied prone for long moments, waiting for the throbbing pain to subside. I rolled over, tried to right myself, when I felt a heavy hand around my throat.  
  
"You little shit, you led us right to her!" The dwarf shook me, hit me. His face was huge and red in front of mine, with a fresh gash down the right cheek. "Oh, I can't wait to get you back to the slicers. They're going to cut you open and figure out what makes you tick. They'll see what's hiding in that stupid little brain of yours, ya retarded little bastard, they'll--"  
  
The Dwarf went silent, eyes wide. His jaw and mouth opened larger, larger; a red spear of bone protruded from his split-open mouth to within inches of my nose. He made gargling, spitting noises, the innards of his skull exposed to the air, his eyes pushing outward from their sockets, and suddenly the spike retreated, his face vacuum-collapsing backwards into a bloody red sphincter of chewed meat.  
  
Babalon stood there, her arm transformed into a three-pronged stalagmite of muscle and bone, flecked with splinters of sinus tissue and teeth. Whipping, grasping tendrils extruded from her pores; her organs slid, ground around beneath her skin, less a person, more a conglomeration of undifferentiated parts working in concert.  
  
The second revelation for which I had not been prepared. The Black Mountain was Babalon. Babalon was the Black Mountain.  
  
The blue elf had stepped out of the fog with lava burns on her right arm. She raised her quarterstaff defensively, but had already lost too much blood to fight. "You," Babalon said, her voice all wrong; like voices from multiple mouths stacked on top of one another. "You have such wonderful cheekbones." She reached for the elf with her normal hand, but it was already cracking, bending, becoming something else. "Tell me… have you ever thought about being an Empress?"  
  
A green lash of something slapped Babalon, drawing a screech out of her. The blue elf stumbled away, shouting an incantation that sprouted thorn vines from the cracked stone beneath us. I twisted my ankle as I leapt clear, barbs sinking deep into my legs.  
  
Babalon abandoned her feet. The steel-strong vines could not be budged, so she tore her legs off at the ankles, stepping out of the bramble. Clicking, flayed talons sprouted from her stumps and she cast herself upon the blue elf, prying the quarterstaff from her hands and pinning her to the ground.  
  
Babalon's mouth changed: splitting, cracking open; becoming her whole neck and torso. It became--Data Deficient--a barrel-wide orifice surrounded by teeth that rotated and buzzed as though drawn on a chain, and she sank this chain-saw-mouth into the blue elf's flesh and she and was transformed from a whole person into not-a-person. Her meat sank into the meat-floor to feed the Black Mountain-Babalon, and Babalon-Black Mountain fed upon the meat.  
  
Out of the fog I saw Augustus, injured but alive, his face a mask of rage and horror. I had never seen another person react to death, had only really seen it once before the world collapsed, and never again. The dead were impersonal things. I thought death was something unassuming to everyone. That was how Babalon saw death: a mere contrivance of form, a passing from one state to another.  
  
The third revelation: that Babalon's views constituted an outlier.  
  
That I was to be disgusted by death.  
  
The Makers had lied to us.  
  
The All-Father had lied to us.  
  
Every time Babalon had asked something of me, I said: "Okay."

What I had meant, what I had been really saying, was "Everything is not okay."  
  
Babalon had become Not-Babalon. She clambered forward on her arms and legs as they reshaped themselves into blood-slick claws. Barbed arms and long, spike-tipped tendrils sprouted from her back. "Murderer!" Augustus shouted, raising his hand with four fingers held rigid, "Betrayer of homeworld! Betrayer of Argus!" A bolt of hissing light shot from his hand and tore chunks from Babalon's frame. The chunks hit the ground and grew mouths and scuttled toward Augustus.  
  
He could not eradicate them as fast as they appeared; he was swarmed. He backed further and further towards the effigy of the All-Father, keeping Babalon at bay with blasts of that superheated light even as pieces of her sunk fangs into his limbs. I understood what he meant to do; did not know if Babalon understood what he would do. The line of destruction would be massive. I could only avoid the center mass. I hobbled as quickly as my twisted ankle could carry me.  
  
They stood at the base of the Father, beneath Babalon's final commingling of death and sex. Augustus was nearly overwhelmed. "Ai, ai!" he cried, dropping his sword. "By the Light!" Babalon reared, Augustus turned. He struck the dragon's legs with blazing hands.  
  
Everything that had happened so slowly now stampeded up behind the present. Time jammed forward with shocking speed. The All-Father came apart at the seams, and down everything came.  
  
Brown dust, black smoke, red fog. The tide swallowed up Augustus and Babalon and washed over me. The mountain rocked and I was thrown to the ground. I covered my eyes, waiting to be crushed, waiting for the particles to shear me to pieces.  
  
The mountain went quiet for the first time.  
  
The All-Father was a heap of wreckage, irreparably destroyed. Charred to pieces where Augustus' light had touched it. I sat up and picked pieces of sand out of the cuts on my legs. The pile was still for a long time. Slowly, the mountain began to stir again. But it had become weak. Calmed. Somehow, even.  
  
She rose from the bones a twisted anatomical parody. Twice as tall, twice as wide, stretched and pulled and torn and burnt and mangled. I had no strength to run. There was nowhere to go. She would find me. There were no more refuges left. She had swallowed up the whole universe, made it into her Art.  
  
She began to shrink and contract. Bone folded into bone, fiber into muscle. Suppurating edges closed. The extraneous limbs became vestigial, disappearing into her flesh. Skin healed over. Her hooves returned, her horns, her eyes. Her jaw snapped back into place; her teeth returned to normal. The Black Mountain was Babalon again, but I could see it clearly now, hiding behind her meat.  
  
Tears filled her eyes. She knelt down, shuffling towards me, arms outstretched.  
  
"Come here, come here, En," she said, grabbing me, crushing me against her. Caressing my scalp. "It's all done, En. They're gone. They're dead."  
  
"I made you," she said.  
  
"You made me."  
  
"I made you. All-Father never was. The Makers never were. Those were just the ghosts of a myth. Of the outside. There is no outside. The bad people are gone. The bad ghosts are gone. They can't hurt you. It's okay now, En."  
  
I wrapped my arms around her. The voices were quiet. The Guide was dead. The Protocols burnt to numb nothings. The mountain had become meat in my eyes, but I pressed my face against the small of her neck and soaked in that cool darkness.  
  
"Everything will be all right, En," she said.  
  
"No one will ever bother us again, En."  
  
"You can help me finish my Art now. We can finish it together, En."  
  
"Finish it together." I wanted to hang in the darkness, safe from everything. She pulled me away, gently, and looked down into my eyes. I stared back into the vastness of the universe.  
  
"Everything will be all right. My child. En. My only child."  
  
"Okay."

 

 

END


End file.
